BIO: Robert Walicki’s first chapbook is A Room Full Of Trees (Redbird Press), and his second, The Almost Sound of Snow Falling, is forthcoming from Night Ballet Press. Additional work appeared in a number of journals including The Kentucky review, Heart Online, and on the radio show Prosody.

2nd Place ‘But Now’ by Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer

for Maddy

I could write about you when you were only the dense tissue connecting my parents, when childhood was your system of tautening muscles and my gender your matrix of fat,

when every year since birth offered you organs of significance: curiosity, compassion; and every death, every discomfort flushed your vessel red and thumped you out alive.

I could put pencil to paper and finger to key when there was nothing new to inspire and everything to exhale: cinema, music, you in religious texts, all alien cells ever ingested.

I could excrete your voice when it was regulated only by a complex of archetypes or phantasy, when every projection ended in that empty chair, in desperate attendance on Gestalt or a god.

But now, when you are made of thick and formidable flesh, sticky steely blood, hair too black and soft to translate between bodies, just a little chance, your own parents, your own will and wish,

I can’t find any original words not a single word at all, so must offer these others instead: you are utterly occupying and saturating, so devastating

that I fear I shall never build again and, should I ever feel once more that tap at tissue or tug at muscle, that foreign call to enter inner worlds, they would be made of you, of you and you, again.

BIO: Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer lives in the North East of England. Their work has appeared in, amongst other things, The American Aesthetic and The Journal and can be found at rosawallingwefelmeyer.wordpress.com.

1st Place ‘Petrichor’ by Torrin Greathouse

I drove, windows down, volume up, down back streets blanketed in gray, stained a shade darker by cloud burst needles of rain.

Cool sunset rushed through the open windows whistling “Patience” and I couldn’t help but to search.

The scent of the earth after rain. The bloody tinge of hard-pack clay gasoline rising from rainbow slicks clouds of tobacco and marijuana smoke, weighed down by the moisture in the air.

The ozone buzz of cable TV static, coffee burning in the pot, the soggy corners of a dog-eared paperback novel the acrid burn of spun-out tires on virgin roads. The scent of life after rain.

Outside the bar, business suited thirty-something undercover drunks search for a bar that is open this early on a Tuesday night.

Like dutch clockwork, the same wooden people circle back like vultures searching for a body to bury their beaks into.

One man slumps italic across the road. His eyes, two bloody marbles buried in his butter cheeks, jackknife the building and he stumbles back from the collision to the side of the road.

His body bends over the gutter, swept clean by rivers of brown water, verging on collapse like a willing convert to the church of the ground.

His guts spill out like the best kind of poetry, an angry flood of pain and the kind of truth you only get when you dissect something.

His grimy forehead glistens with beads of sweat like car window coated in dust and tears. Baptized in the salt of his own adobe body, this man is what everyone wishes they were.

And as he stumbles on, violently into that gray night, I can’t help but notice he smells like a hard rain.

BIO: Torrin Greathouse is a Literary Journalism student and governing member of the Uncultivated Rabbits spoken word collective at UC Irvine. He was the 2015 winner of the Orange County Poetry Slam. Torrin’s work has been published in several literary magazines and one chapbook, Cosmic Taxi Driver Blues. He is currently employed as the executive assistant of a sustainable lighting firm. His previous jobs include security guard, farm hand, antique store clerk and tattoo artist.